Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots
by mossring
Summary: "远离家乡，不胜唏嘘，幻化成秋叶，而我却像落叶归根坠在你心间" — "I have left home with much emotion, and these emotions have shaped into dreary autumn leaves in my mind. And yet, just like how falling leaves return to their roots, I have fallen back into your heart." — Linh walks amidst the falling leaves of Wildwood and ponders on the life she's been forced to leave behind since her banishment. One-shot.


**A/N: **_one of my favourite, if not my favourite, chinese proverbs has always been 落叶归根, which literally means: 'falling leaves return to their roots'. It's used to say how all things will go back to their source eventually, and it's also popularly used to describe how expatriates will return home, where their roots are, eventually._

_it's also the name of an english book, a self-biography of author Adeline Yen Mah, titled Falling Leaves in English, and the title of a Chinese song by singer Wang Leehom. (In fact, the Chinese words in the summary are taken from the lyrics of that song.)_

_i got reminded of Tam and Linh by this proverb. it's actually something i've always wanted to write into my tam & linh fic (everything has changed), into the last chapter, but of course i never finished everything has changed._

_so this came rather spontaneously, and i was suprised because i don't really write for kotlc anymore, but i'm happy i wrote it down, so enjoy! :)_

* * *

Four years. It had been four years.

Quantified, four years didn't sound like a long time, but Linh knew better than anybody that four years was a long time.

It was _eternity._

She walked through Wildwood amongst the trees she'd learned to know so well, dead leaves crunching beneath the soles of her Exillium boots, her left hand reached out, fingers trailing against the rough bark of the trees.

The skin was peeling off, and when she scraped her fingers against one of the trunks lightly, a patch of it came off the tree and fell to the forest floor with a thud, landing limp against the sea of fallen leaves.

Linh looked up—towards the dying canopy of leaves that were barely hanging on, and twisted, twig-thin branches that obscured the clouds in the darkening sky. The sunset had painted the world golden-red, casting an unearthly glow over Wildwood and tinging the trees and leaves orange—and for a second, Linh couldn't see the sickness that had marred the land she'd spent four years in.

For a second, Wildwood looked alive again.

Then the illusion faded, and that feeling died along with the forest. Linh's heart twisted, and some part of her mind wondered if _she_ was dying along with the trees in the forest.

After all, it had been four years, and four years had done nothing but to make her slowly wither and shrivel up like the leaves in Wildwood, taken over by the plague.

Four years since she'd been taken away from the glittering Lost Cities. Four years since she'd been taken away from the equally glittery Choralmere, and her parents.

Her parents. They seemed so far away now, so utterly untouchable, and yet Linh couldn't help but wonder whether Quan and Mai still thought about her and Tam. Whether the image of their Unworthy daughter lingered in their hearts and minds just as much as they took up space in Linh's thoughts. Whether it bothered them so much that Mai would translate her frustration—or whatever emotion she felt towards Linh—and twist it into one of her haunting melodies.

Mai's compositions were one of the only things Linh liked about her mother. Music was something that didn't need to be put into words, it was simply something that was inherently understandable. Music made you _feel_ things, and Mai's music was no different.

Even now, one of Mai's compositions was playing in Linh's head, a sad, _yearning _melody that tugged at her heartstrings inexplicably as she watched a orange-red leaf detach from its stalk and fall, fluttering in the wind, completely buffeted by the currents of nature as it made its inevitable descent to the earth.

It reminded Linh of herself. Like her, that leaf had been forced out of its home and left to fend for itself in a dangerous, foreign land. Feeling a sudden pang in her heart, she quickened her footsteps and tiptoed, arm outstretched and fingers extended, trying to catch the leaf into her hand and save it from its fate—but the wind teased the falling leaf out of her fingers' grasp, an infuriatingly innocent dance that made Linh bite her lip, her heart sinking with the leaf she'd failed to save.

Another one swallowed up by the plague.

The leaf landed on one of the roots of the tree it had fallen from. Frowning, Linh approached it curiously, watching as the leaf balanced precariously on the edge of the root, before it shifted slightly and established its permanent landing position, now unmoving.

Roots. The leaf had went back to its roots. Linh's lips curled up slightly the strangely fitting observation. She looked up at the few remaining leaves on that tree, then down at the roots of the tree, and realised the roots were blanketed with its own fallen leaves, strokes of brown peeking out from the ocean of orange.

"Falling leaves," she murmured in the still of the dying woods. She smiled, a little bittersweet, as she gazed at the fallen leaf. "Falling leaves return to their roots."

She finally had an answer to her previous worries, however strange and bittersweet it may feel.

Linh was a falling leaf. She'd fallen from her stalk, her home in the Lost Cities, banished to the unknown, the wild Neutral Territories, where only the unpredictable wind—and Tam by her side—would slow and soften her inevitable fall.

And she was still falling, still suspended in the air after four years.

But falling leaves return to their roots, and Linh knew she would—eventually—return to _her _roots.

The Lost Cities. Choralmere.

It was only a matter of time. And if—no, _when_—that time came, Linh knew she wouldn't be the same leaf that they'd plucked from their branch, unable to fend and fight for herself. No, she would be different—after all, the winds of change were coming.

She would be _stronger._ Her parents would not get the chance to send her away again. She would be the stubborn falling leaf that returns to its roots, dredging up her parents' unwanted thoughts and sentiments about her that they'd buried in the soil four years ago.

And she would return to the Lost Cities to stay.


End file.
